3 themes gaining ground in advertising and branding are--
(From World Advertising Research Center)

1. Purpose-led strategies:
For a long time marketers are talking about benefits, and the benefits of benefits.
But now the 'purpose' is gaining traction as a driver for marketing strategies. It is becoming an important feature of the top creative campaigns.

As per the WARC report:
Many brands have concluded that they need to make a meaningful change – to do rather than just speak. 

Brands needs to ‘radically authentic’; a brand needs to know its purpose and then ‘actually do something to make it happen’. 

2. Casting customers:
Directly involving customers in campaigns, whether to drive behavioural change, to generate PR coverage, or to drive brand engagement, is another theme that comes through in this year’s Creative 100.

Like what Burger King did. It asked its customers to dress up as clowns in a campaign that trolled its competitor’s mascot, Ronald the Clown.

Bringing customers into the ads means they become more than just ads; in the words of Martin Beverley:

"Many of the ideas on this creative list aren’t just ads, they’re acts – designed to impact popular culture and make a dent in the real world”.

3. Creativity across the experience:
Rather than seeing a campaign as an entity existing on a single channel, some of the most awarded brands created experiences where the creative idea
was woven into every element of the purchase journey, building customer executions across multiple channels to work at those moments.

Tide's--It's a Tide Ad & Budwiser's TagWords campaigns are good examples of engaging consumers beyond the advertising. And getting better ROI for the bucks.